Zel Cracks Up
by Night and Gale
Summary: A rare moment when Zel isn't quite as stony as he seems. Zel's apprentice, Amelia, gives him a disarming surprise.


Hey! Just a cute one-shot from a brand-new fanfic author. I was trying to write a long, serious action/adventure story, but this just came out. It didn't fit with the flow of the long fic, so I'm posting it as a humorous one-shot.  
  
I do not own Lina, Zelgaddis, Gourry, Amelia, Rezo, or the Bezerkers. To the best of my knowledge, they belong to Hajime Kanzaka.  
  
Lina wondered at the changes Zelgaddis seemed to be going through. Over the past months, she had watched the stony young man slowly become accustomed to herself and Gourry, then warm up to Amelia, whom he was teaching magic. Zel was a strict and demanding teacher, and Amelia was a rebellious and impatient student. They quarrelled almost as often and as loudly as Lina and Gourry. But recently, when the entire group held their breaths, waiting for an explosion of Zel's temper, he would startle them all with his small, self-effacing smile.  
  
Just two weeks earlier, the mischevious girl tried to turn his sword pink, her newest favorite color. She succeeded in turning it pink, but the spell had an unforseen side effect: it made the blade as limp as a cooked noodle. Afraid of his temper, she hid the blade in his sheath and didn't tell Zel what she had done. When the group was attacked by a gang of bezerkers, he leapt to the front and drew his sword, whose pink blade promptly drooped to the ground. Reacting instinctively to the first bezerker's lunge, he stabbed forward, and the blade connected with the creatures body with a wet THWAP. The creature, howling with pain, retreated before looking down and noticing he hadn't been hurt at all. The creature's small brain took almost a minute to come to the conclusion that he wasn't dying and that this pink blade was not dangerous. The bezerker charged Zel again, and Zel took the opportunity to prove that he was a dangerous opponent even without a sword: the stream of fire he cast from his hand reduced his opponent to charcoal in moments. After Lina finished off the last of the monsters with a flare arrow, the group gathered to stare at Zel's limp sword, which he still held in his right hand.  
  
Gourry tried to comfort him. "Sometimes these things just happen, Zel. I'm sure its noone's fault."   
  
Zel ignored him and Lina, who was having trouble stifling her giggles behind her hand. He rounded on Amelia and asked in his quietest, deadliest voice, "Did you do this?" Amelia cringed and nodded, staring at the ground. Zel's voice grew, "And you didn't TELL ME??" Amelia nodded again. "You, you, YOU--" his voice rose and cracked.  
  
Lina had never heard him lose control of his voice, not even when he learned that Rezo had seized control of his mind on the fateful day Shabranigdo was reborn. She readied a magic shield in case he tried to kill the girl.  
  
Zel stared at Amelia, then his pink, floppy sword, then at the girl again. His face contorted into a silent scream, he grabbed his stomach and crumpled into himself, shoulders shaking. The group, horrified, could only stare. Then they realized that the sounds they had believed were sobs were actually peals of laughter.  
  
Recovering himself, Zel looked at the limp sword and with a glint in his eye and deadpanned, "How embarrassing; rather less than you expected, I'm sure. I swear this has never happened to me before." Lina laughed so hard she fell to the ground, and Zel joined in again good-naturedly. Gourry and Amelia didn't understand the joke at all, but the sword itself looked funny enough, and they all remembered the look on Zel's face when he had unsheathed it. For almost ten minutes they struggled to regain their composures, but then their eyes would meet and the remembered joke would send them off again. Finally, exhausted, they lay on the grass.  
  
"Uh, Zel?" Amelia began in a small voice. He grunted, so she continued, "Does this mean you aren't mad at me?"   
  
"Furious," he answered calmly. "Not only did you try a spell that you clearly weren't ready for, not only did you steal my weapon, but you also didn't admit your wrongdoing and warn me that my sword wouldn't work. You put several lives in danger through your stupidity." Amelia thought she liked it better when he screamed and yelled. These calm words made her feel far worse than Zel's curses. "However," Zel continued, "you will make many, many mistakes far worse than this one. Besides," Zel's eyes twinkled, "your spell is not nearly as dangerous as the one I accidentally cast on my own teacher."   
  
"Hunh?" Amelia said. Everyone leaned close to hear him; it was rare for Zel to mention anything about his past.  
  
"This was before Rezo created this body," Zel began, his voice surprizingly without bitterness. "My uncle was teaching me a transformation spell. He directed me to turn a stone into a fish, but I was fooling around and didn't even bother with the words. There was a flash of light, and a fish was suddenly lying next to the stone and my teacher was nowhere to be found. I realized that my uncle had just become the most annoyed trout I had ever seen." Zel laughed and shook his head. "Fortunately I got him to a stream without incident, and he swam in place, just glaring at me. It took me three tries to turn him back, and even then I couldn't completely remove the gills."   
  
Gaffawing, Gourry said, "I'd like to meet this uncle of yours."   
  
"Dead."   
  
"I'm sorry, Zel, I didn't mean to--"  
  
"He died many years ago, killed by an ogre. My one goal in life at the time was to become strong enough so that nothing could ever hurt me as much as losing my uncle did. But I was so stupid . . . my only surviving kin was Rezo." Zel's voice had darkened.  
  
"Rezo the Red Priest was your kin?" Gourry exclaimed.  
  
"My great grandfather, or my great-great grandfather, I can't remember. But he became my guardian. You know the rest."   
  
He stood and started walking, his stony facade back in place. All his friends stared after him, wondering whether they had imagined the past fifteen minutes. They had never seen him so relaxed or open. Amelia ran after him, carrying the floppy sword, and yelled "Hyah!" as she swung the blade at his exposed back. The THWAP noise set off the entire group again in howls of laughter, clutching their aching stomachs.  
  
When they finally got underway again, Amelia walked in the back next to Zel. Lena was busy repeatedly hitting Gourry over the head for having dared to suggest that she had a temper. Gourry was busy running and getting hit. Amelia impulsively grabbed one of Zel's hands. Puzzled, he stopped and turned to her. She grinned up at him and squeezed his hand, then tugged him forward to catch up with the others and prevent them from killing each other.  
  
Amelia grinned. It would take time, but she would do it. She would turn Zel back into a human, one laugh at a time. 


End file.
